do the watering without help. So I gave them her. I never put two and two
together.

"Well, when I heard that the Company was going to have a row with the
Matabele, I thought I'd volunteer. They said there was lots of loot to be
got, and land to be given out, and that sort of thing, and I thought I'd
only be gone about three months. So I went. I left those women there, and
a lot of stuff in the garden and some sugar and rice, and I told them not
to leave till I came back; and I asked the other man to keep an eye on
them. Both those women were Mashonas. They always said the Mashonas
didn't love the Matabele; but, by God, it turned out that they loved them
better than they loved us. They've got the damned impertinence to say,
that the Matabele oppressed them sometimes, but the white man oppresses
them all the time!

"Well, I left those women there," said Peter, dropping his hands on his
knees. "Mind you, I'd treated those women really well. I'd never given
either of them one touch all the time I had them. I was the talk of all
the fellows round, the way I treated them. Well, I hadn't been gone a
month, when I got a letter from the man I worked with, the one who had the
woman first--he's dead now, poor fellow; they found him at his hut door
with his throat cut--and what do you think he said to me? Why, I hadn't
been gone six hours when those two women skooted! It was all the big one.
What do you think she did? She took every ounce of ball and cartridge she
could find in that hut, and my old Martini-Henry, and even the lid off the
tea-box to melt into bullets for the old muzzle-loaders they have; and off
she went, and took the young one too. The fellow wrote me they didn't
touch another thing: they left the shawls and dresses I gave them kicking
about the huts, and went off naked with only their blankets and the
ammunition on their heads. A nigger man met them twenty miles off, and he